ICELAND
Grunnskoli Grundarfjardar
Grunnskóli Grundarfjarðar is a primary/secondary school with 96 pupils (6-16 years) and a kindergarten department for five year olds. There are 12 teachers, plus principal and vice-principal. The school is situated on the north of Snæfellsnespeninsula, in western part of Iceland, by Breiðafjordur. It is full of history and beautiful nature. Kirkjufell is Grundarfjordur’s iconic landmark, situated just by the village. Grundarfjordur´s main industry is fishing. The town it self is relatively young but stands on an age-long tradition of small scale fishing in small rowboats from the local
farmsteads. It was also the site of a bustling French fishing outpost in the middle of 19th century. Like most communities in Iceland we have a close relationship with the sea. Breidafjordur is one of the richest fishing grounds near Iceland and has in ages past been called Icelands food chest. It has rich spawning grounds for cod, pollock amongst others. Most prominent of other seafood is scallop, blue mussel, and kelp. It is also the spawning grounds for many species of seabirds such as auks, gannets and puffins. This rich fjord is also the habitat for harbour and greyseals, dolphins and orcas. Our little town of 800 people is an open and welcoming community and most people know everyone by name. It has, in addition to the primary school, a kindergarten, secondary school and a music school. Our schools motto is ambition, cooperation, responsibility and joy. It is run on the principles of inclusion and multiculturalism which has been adopted in the national curriculum. Our students learn
English from the age of six and Danish from the age of ten. About 10% of our students are second gen immigrants, mostly from Poland, who grow up bilingual and learn Polish from the age of six instead of Danish. We routinely use our local environment as a basis for projects in different subjects such as arts, history, biology and ICT. In our school we have a good and ambitious ICT team, who are always looking for new ways and ideas to use technology in teaching. The key persons in charge of running the project will be the principal and a history teacher, who is also ICT and arts teacher,
and an English teacher, but the whole school community will be involved in the project as well. We would very much like to share with other schools our nature,our culture, folktales and music. We have no experience in projects like this and are looking forward to it. Hopefully this is just the beginning in our European journey. The Key people in this project is history, Art and ICT teacher Sigurrós Sandra Bergvinsdóttir, Principal Sigurður Gíslí Guðjónsson and english teacher Helga María Jóhannesdóttir.